The present invention relates generally to a computer documentation validation method, and more particularly, but not by way of limitation, to a system, method, and computer program product for discovering problems and errors in an entire set of program/software documentation written by humans and flagging the documentation errors to suggest corrections to humans.
Commercial software for programs or web-based applications requires extensive documentation from the vendor so that users may engage productively with the software. However, when this documentation is poorly written, it can mislead or prevent the user from using the software to its full capacity, thus harming the user experience. Software documentation can run into the hundreds or thousands of pages and require standard quality control measures by humans that can significantly add to the cost of creating and maintaining such documentation.
Some conventional techniques consider parsing one or more product installation documents to identify annotations associated with installation procedures. Installation procedure descriptions, parameters, and prerequisites associated with the identified annotations are extracted, and prescriptive step-by-step installation instructions that integrate installation procedures contained within the one or more installation documents are generated. However, these techniques apply to documentation for installing software and the goal to extract a set of step-by-step instructions from the installation documentation rather than errors in the documentation itself.
Other conventional validation techniques relate to computer-generated documentation files being tested to determine if the computer-generated files are executable. However, these exemplary techniques are much different from a technique required for human generated documentation.
Conventional techniques require humans to exhaustively check the entire content of the documentation for errors instead of focusing on portions that are identified to have errors. That is, the conventional techniques are disadvantageous because an expansive and costly human resource department (or the like) is conventionally required by companies to test the computer documentation for errors.